Bulgaria

How to hire software developers in Bulgaria

Contractor of Record

The simplest and easiest way to hire Bulgarian developers is through a contractor of record (CoR). With a CoR, a third party like Elite Brains becomes the legal contracting party with the developer. You do not sign directly with the developer, but with Elite Brains, and they handle the contract, local compliance, as well as Bulgarian tax requirements. This setup brings several major advantages.

First, compliance: Bulgarian authorities are strict about the line between an independent contractor and an employee, and getting that line wrong is expensive. If a working relationship is reclassified, you will face legal consequences, fines, and even back pay. A CoR absorbs this risk instead of you.

Second, liability: since Elite Brains is the contracting party, you are shielded from Bulgarian labor law exposure, and should Bulgarian authorities come asking questions about a contractor's status, they will go to Elite Brains.

Third, the relationship stays clean on your end: your company has a straightforward B2B arrangement with Elite Brains — no payroll, no local registration, and no HR overhead — while you still manage the developer's actual day-to-day work and direction yourself. You get all the control of working directly with someone, none of the legal burden of employing them.

Create an entity in Bulgaria

If you wish to hire developers in Bulgaria on your own, you need to set up an entity in Bulgaria - essentially a legal structure that lets a foreign company employ someone under Bulgarian law. The standard vehicle is an EOOD (single-member limited liability company) or an OOD (multi-member version) under Bulgaria's Commerce Act. Unlike many countries, there's no residency requirement for founders or directors, and the minimum share capital is a symbolic 1 EUR. To register, you draft founding documents, register a Bulgarian business address, deposit the minimum capital, and file with the Commercial Register at the Registry Agency. Once approved, the company receives a Unified Identification Code (UIC), after which it can register with the National Revenue Agency for tax purposes and begin operating. The whole process typically takes 3-7 business days if you're present in Bulgaria to handle notary and bank steps in person, or 2-3 weeks if managed remotely through a power of attorney.

Once the entity exists, the developer hired through it comes on as a full employee and is entitled to the full set of protections set out in the Bulgarian Labour Code. These include a standard 40-hour workweek, at least 20 days of paid annual leave, paid public holidays, sick leave, and extensive maternity leave provisions. Every employment contract must be registered with the National Revenue Agency within three days of signing, and the employer is responsible for withholding income tax and remitting mandatory social security and health insurance contributions, which add roughly 19% on top of gross salary.

The advantage of this method is zero ambiguity. You're the legal employer in control, and there are no classification risks. However, the disadvantages are significant. Setting up the local entity, maintaining a registered address, and carrying ongoing bookkeeping, payroll, tax filings, and mandatory contribution costs can easily outweigh the benefits, especially for hiring just one or two Bulgarian software engineers.

Hiring as a Foreign Employer

Bulgaria offers a second path most countries including Brazil, Colombia, Ukraine, or the Philippines don't: registering directly with the National Revenue Agency (NRA) as a "foreign employer" and becoming someone's legal employer without setting up a company at all.

To register, you'll need a certificate of good standing, a tax registration certificate, and sometimes a VAT certificate from your home country, all apostilled and translated into Bulgarian, along with a local representative in Bulgaria who acts on your behalf under a formal power of attorney. Once approved, the NRA assigns you a service number as your official ID as a foreign employer. The whole process typically takes one to two weeks.

From there, hiring works the same way as it would through an entity. You sign a compliant employment contract under the Bulgarian Labour Code, covering job title, salary, working hours, leave entitlements, and notice period, and you register that contract with the NRA within three days of signing - a hard legal deadline. The developer comes on as a full employee with the same protections we already discussed.

The advantage of this method is that it skips incorporation entirely. There's no company to register, no registered address to maintain, and no Commercial Register filing - just a faster registration directly with the tax authority. However, the disadvantages mirror those of setting up an entity, and in some ways run longer. From the moment the employment contract is signed, you take on full and ongoing employer responsibility: calculating monthly payroll, withholding income tax, remitting social security and health insurance contributions and filing the required declarations with the NRA every month, for as long as the person works for you. Miss a deadline or get a detail wrong, and Bulgarian authorities come directly to you - there's no local entity or third party absorbing that risk on your behalf. It's a lighter path into direct employment than incorporating, but not a lighter path out of the liability that comes with it.

Cross-border payments

You could also skip both a local entity and Elite Brains, and just hire a Bulgarian developer directly as a contractor. This is quick to set up. But it comes with a real risk: Bulgarian authorities can decide that your "contractor" is actually an employee in disguise, and reclassify the relationship. That would leave you on the hook for the taxes, benefits, backpay, and even penalties.

Bulgarian authorities look at the real working relationship, not the paperwork. If your "contractor" works fixed hours, uses equipment you gave them, reports to a manager, joins team meetings, or only works for you, that looks like a real employee - no matter what the contract calls them. And Bulgaria actively checks for this.

If your company gets caught doing this, here's what happens: you owe backdated social security payments (your share and theirs, plus interest), unpaid tax penalties, and fines of roughly €750-2,500 per person for a first offense. The worker can also separately demand unpaid leave and other benefits they should have gotten as an employee. And since no one else is sharing this risk with you, it's all on you.

How to pay developers in Bulgaria

How you pay a Bulgarian developer depends on where you're paying from. If you're inside the eurozone, it's a standard SEPA transfer, but that still takes one to two business days to clear. If you're paying from outside SEPA - the US, UK, or elsewhere - it's an international SWIFT wire instead, which brings FX conversion costs and exposes you to exchange rate movement between the day you send it and the day it lands. Either way, the payment rail itself is only one part of the picture: you still need a compliant contract, a way to track hours or deliverables, and a system for approving invoices before anything actually gets paid.

That's exactly the kind of friction a platform like Elite Brains is built to remove. Paying a Bulgarian developer shouldn't mean tracking exchange rates, choosing between SWIFT and a fintech intermediary, or chasing down invoices by email - and with EliteBrains, it doesn't.

EliteBrains covers everything needed to hire a developer in Bulgaria. Once you've hired, you set up the contract directly on the platform: define the rate and lay out reporting rules and payment conditions up front. The developer uses the platform to log their hours or submit deliverables as work progresses. You stay in control of approvals, and when it's time to pay, EliteBrains handles the payout. Contracts, approvals, and payments all live in one place, so nothing falls through the cracks between hiring someone and actually getting them paid.

Testing software developers

So how do you make sure the developer you're hiring is actually the best for the job? A resume often won't tell you that - it just tells you what someone says they've done, not what they can actually do. This is where EliteBrains' AI skill assessment comes in, making the whole process quick and easy. Just feed it the job description, the skills you need, and the seniority level, and it builds a real test in seconds. Not trivia questions - real tasks, the kind the person would actually do on the job. Every candidate gets the same test and the same scoring, making comparison simple. By the time your team sits down for an interview, you're only talking to people who've already proven they can do the work.

How to find software developers in Bulgaria

You know how you'll hire, pay, and test a Bulgarian developer - now you just need to find one. These are the most common approaches, and where they fall short:

Searching manually

You can search for your developer manually on platforms like LinkedIn or GitHub, which is free, but it's slow and entirely on you. Messaging developers cold means low response rates, and no real way to verify skill until you're already deep in the process.

Marketplaces

Another option is open marketplaces - a fast method, but risky in quality, since anyone can sign up and call themselves a developer. Not to mention the classification risk and cross-border payment complexity covered earlier in this guide. You could also turn to more premium, vetted marketplaces, where the quality is much better, but which come with a steep price floor and high hourly rates.

Tech recruiters or personal agencies

You could also choose to use a local recruiter with market knowledge who can hand you a shortlist without you lifting a finger - but you pay greatly for that. Agency fees typically run as a percentage of the hire's salary, on top of whatever you're already paying the developer, which adds up fast.

Elite Brains

EliteBrains sourcing is built to skip that whole trade-off - speed, quality, price, legal risk, all of it. Posting a job is free. From there, EliteBrains' AI looks through hundreds of thousands of profiles and brings you the ones that actually match what you're looking for. Every developer has already been through a rigorous vetting process before you even see their profile, so you're choosing from people who've already proven themselves. You move at your own pace, and if it's not the right fit, there's a risk-free trial before you commit to anything. And once you've found your developer, everything stays in one place: the skill tests, the contract, the payments. No bouncing between five different tools just to hire one person.